What Mark Zuckerberg learned from Caesar Augustus

Key Takeaways

so the 19yearold Mark um reads a bunch of like Antiquity and Classics uh High School College what important lesson did you learn from it not just interesting things you found but like there aren't that many tokens who consume by the time you're 19 a bunch of them were about the classics clearly that was important in some way tokens you cons I mean one of the things I thought was really fascinating is um so when Augustus was first so he he became emperor and um and he was trying to establish peace and there was no real conception of Peace at the time like the people's people's understanding of Peace was it is the temporary time between when your enemies will inevitably attack you again so you get like a short rest and and he had this view which is like look like we want to change the economy from instead of being so mercenary and like and kind of militaristic to like actually this positive some thing it's like a very novel idea the time I think that that there's like something that's just really fundamental about that it's like in terms of the the bounds on like what people can conceive at the time of like what are rational ways to work and um I don't know I going back to like I this applies to both the metaverse and the AI stuff but like a lot of investors and just different people just can't wrap their head around why we would open source this like I don't understand it's like open source that must just be like the temporary time between which you're making things propri but but I actually think it's like this very profound thing in Tech that creates a lot of winners right and it's and and um so I don't know I don't want to strain the analogy too much but but I do think that there's there's a lot of times I think ways where you can that are just like models for building things that people can't even like they just like often can't wrap their head around how that would be a valuable thing for people to go do or like a reasonable state of the world that I think there's more reasonable things than people think that's super fascinating um can I give you my answer what I was thinking you might have gotten from it um this is probably totally off but um just how young some of these people are who have very important roles in the Empire like Caesar Augustus like by the time he's 19 he's actually incredibly one of the most prominent people in Roman politics and he's like leading battles and forming the second tribe M at I wonder if you're like the 19-year-old is like I can actually do this because like I think that's an interesting example both from a lot of history and American history too I mean one of my favorite quotes is it's this Picasso quote that all children are artists and the challenge is how do you remain an artist when you grow up and it's like basically I think because when you're younger I think it's just easier to have kind of wild ideas and you're not you know you have no there are all these analogies to the innovators dilemma that exist in your life as well as your company or whatever you've built right so you know you're kind of earlier on your trajectory it's easier to Pivot and take in new ideas without it disrupting other commitments that you've made to to different things and um so I don't know I think that that's an interesting part of of running a company is like how do you how do you kind of stay dynamic